“Jordan Saunders: A Life in the Slave Trade”

The recent profusion of scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism has meant in turn that we know more and more about the domestic slave trade whose agents forcibly moved nearly one million enslaved people from the southeast to the southwest over the course of the first sixty years of the nineteenth century. But we still know relatively little about those agents themselves or about the logistics of how exactly they located, purchased, moved, and then negotiated the resale of those they bought and sold. This paper focuses on Jordan Saunders, a Tennessean who worked as one of the Virginia purchasing agents for Franklin and Armfield, the largest slave trading firm in the South during the 1820s and 1830s. Drawing primarily on a set of roughly fifty letters Saunders sent to a business partner in Tennessee, the paper will document how Saunders went from being a small-time trader working mostly on his own to being recruited in New Orleans by Isaac Franklin to serve as an agent of Franklin’s firm. It will detail how Saunders worked the Virginia countryside purchasing people on Franklin’s behalf and on behalf of a partnership he created on his own accord, and thus document not only the biography of a slave trader but also the intricacies of exchange and capital flows that made the slave trade function in antebellum America. This talk is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch and we’ll provide the drinks & dessert.